JOEY KENNEDY: Dancing all around that smoke

Don't laugh, but my wife and I like to dance. She's pretty good; I'm not. But that's not the problem.

Just about any nightclub or bar we might go to on the random Friday or Saturday night we feel our boogie coming on is saturated with cigarette smoke.

I can tolerate the smoke; my wife cannot. It makes her physically ill. Because of that, if we want to cut the rug, we usually cut it at home. Which, I admit, does save people from having to see mighty me in motion. It's not a pretty sight.

Still, if Veronica and I want a night of smoke-free dancing, we have few options, other than home.

For more than a dozen years, there's been a bill in the Legislature to change that. It would ban smoking in restaurants, bars, workplaces and most all other public places. In some years, the statewide anti-smoking policy has come close to passing. This year, the Alabama Smoke-free Air Act, as it's called now, was dead out of the gate.

I wrote several editorials from different angles throughout the legislative session urging the bill's passage.

I argued the health benefits of smoke-free places.

Secondhand smoke is a leading cause of preventable death in the nation, with nearly 60,000 lung cancer and heart disease deaths a year in nonsmokers. Pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable to secondhand smoke. And while anybody exposed to secondhand smoke puts her health at risk, people who work in places where smoking is allowed -- servers, bartenders and others -- are especially in danger. They have little choice but to keep breathing poisonous air if they want to keep their jobs.

Money angle

Then, because the Legislature is now controlled by Republicans -- fiscal conservatives, right? -- I argued the money angle. Last year, a national study showed that Alabama's economy suffers $5.6 billion a year in direct costs because of smoking, including more than $1 billion in lost workplace productivity and $1.7 billion in direct medical expenditures. Much of those medical costs are under Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor that always is in crisis.

The Legislature was unmoved.

"These new legislators, so many of them are opposed to it," says Ginny Campbell, the government relations director in Alabama for the American Cancer Society. "They don't know anything about the (American) Cancer Society, much less (about) this issue."

A big part of Campbell's job is to educate lawmakers.

"We just have a lot of education to do," Campbell says. "We've got to go back to square one."

Campbell says she knew the bill was in trouble early on. When a Republican sponsor in the Senate couldn't be found, "we knew we were doomed," Campbell says.

"But we really knew we were doomed when we started trying to lobby it," she says. "We knew we didn't have the votes."

Unless the leadership in the House and Senate gets behind a smoke-free bill, such legislation may not move anywhere until the Legislature changes. Campbell believes if House Speaker Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, gets on board, the bill has a shot in a future session.

For his part, Hubbard says he is ready to help.

"I support it and I believe we can pass it out of the House," Hubbard says. "One of the things this year that hampered it is we had so many other issues to deal with."

Hubbard's mother died of lung cancer; he says he has a personal stake in the legislation. "It has an opportunity next year," Hubbard says.

For now, anti-smoking advocacy groups are backing local efforts. The Jefferson County Department of Health is pushing for 100 percent smoke-free laws for all over the county, but particularly for five cities: Birmingham, Bessemer, Homewood, Hoover and Gardendale.

Unless the Alabama Legislature catches up with most of the rest of the nation in deciding to protect residents and workers from the real dangers of secondhand smoke, the saving grace for nonsmokers in Alabama may have to be local laws.

Until then, Campbell and her colleagues have to keep working. And Veronica and I will do most of our dancing at home.

Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an editorial writer, blogger and editor of the Sunday Viewpoints section for The News. E-mail: jkennedy@bhamnews.com